Some thoughts for the few readers of this website.  A bit of politics perhaps.  Take it or leave it as you wish.

Our RV, Harley, has returned to home base!  We arrived home in it at about six a.m. this morning, pulled into our driveway, parked, crawled into our bed in the back, and slept for about two hours.  We had completed a marathon run from southern Illinois starting yesterday morning with only brief stops along the way.  After breakfast this morning, we wacked weeds to make a path, opened up the house, and unloaded the camper. 

Whew.  We pause today after two weeks of intensive birding during the "monsoon" season in southeastern Arizona.  The exercise has been demanding, frustrating, and immensely rewarding.  First there was a week at Amado from where we probed the Santa Rita Mountains and the frontier region along Pena Blanca Road.  Last week we joined the Southwestern Wings Birding and Nature Festival in Sierra Vista.  Volunteer and professional guides led us into the Huachuca

We currently reside at the town of Amado in Arizona some 40 miles from the border with the state of Sonora, Mexico.   We find Arizona more focused on the issue of border security than most.  This has lead to controversy, I suppose, but the people here have bigger concerns than criticism from those who think they know better. 

A nemesis bird is one that frustrates a birder's best efforts to observe it by staying elsewhere or out of sight despite best efforts to locate it.  We have had various nemesis birds, and the White-tailed Ptarmigan was working hard for this distinction. 

Coming east for the past month, we finally ran out of Utah.  There we ventured by a multitude of strange rock formations including arches, natural bridges, pinnacles, fins, cliffs, and slot canyons.  Traveling to lower elevations we passed through thousands of feet of sediments that comprise the Colorado Plateau.  This mass of nearly continuous deposits over the last 500 million years was shoved up some ten thousand feet and is now being furiously washed out by the streams that flow

Sunday at camp and time for relaxation and small chores.  Independence Day was celebrated here yesterday.  This is Mormon country and, as in Southern Baptist country, the church is the focus of social life and Sunday is the main church day. 

The sun is intense and the bright gray siltstone that makes up much of the canyon wall creates a huge reflecting funnel.  This afternoon after a day of touring, we sit in our air-conditioned  motorhome.  It it were not windy, we might make do by putting out the awning, but today it would blow away. 

The natives are complaining.  This may be a year without a summer in this Northwest Region.  Here in the desert the folks are astounded by summer tanagers.  These birds are everywhere and people who have never before noticed them now see their red faces peering from yard shade trees.  The birds want to go up the mountain and get about the business of breeding and nesting, but the mountains are cold and covered with snow fields and trees that are only now beginning to leaf o

We had NO IDEA when we were following directions from the Idaho Birding Trail that we were going to find a modern day “Brigadoon”.  June 7th had started out as a routine birding day.  At 6:15 am we were on the road in southern Idaho.  By mid morning we had already seen 42 species with 2 stops:  Bruneau Dunes State Park, which has “the tallest single-structured sand dune in North America” and Ted Trueblood Wildlife Management Area, a large lake surrounded by reeds.